5 Boredom Prevention Tactics while waiting on the Doctor

We’ve all been there……banging our heads on the wall while we wait with our child for the Doctor to come in. So here’s a few tactics we’ve resorted to and now look forward to doing should we have a long wait.

1) Use that stiff white paper your child is sitting on to play hangman and tic-tac-toe.

*This works like a charm. Just don’t use a sharpie unless your Doctor is okay with you decorating the vinyl bench with hangman pictures. And he’s probably not so just stick with a ball point pen. Our Doctor came in once and finished the word for Sophie. I was totally impressed with his hangman abilities.

2) Play truth or dare while you wait.

*This is awesome fun and a bit risky. We never do the truth but always do the dares. We are clear that we can never do anything that would damage anything or disrupt anyone or anything. Like I had to say, “No Way!” to the dare Sophie gave me of pulling the fire alarm. Teachable moment there about the seriousness of that and to never ever do that. See – you can still learn while having fun. Ha! Some of our past dares:

put a rubber glove on your head

do the chicken dance

twirl 5 times in the middle of the room

squeeze the blood pressure bulb thingy

stick a tongue depressor up your nose

You’re always dreading the door opening at any given moment but so far neither of us have ever been caught in the middle of our dare.

3) Play Doctor

I’m not good at this but Randy is hilarious with it. He makes the kids (when they were little) lie down on the table and he pretends to be the Doctor. He makes them stick out their tongue and makes fun of their bad breath. He pretends to pull vines out of their ears and makes them do crazy exercises. He always has Sophie cracking up hysterically.

4) Play Charades

My all time favorite was when Sophie was a “dead fly” on the table. Laying on her back with her legs and arms straight up in the air. Classic.

5) I Spy

Just good ole classic I Spy in the Doctor’s office. There are a million black items we’ve noticed over the years so we try to find the tiniest spec of color we can possibly find.

So that’s all I got right now. It’s fresh on my mind because we had two whole hours in a tiny little office this week. We went through every one of these things and I was so tired by the end I made her pull out her iPod to play a game. Ha! Seriously, I was like YOU WILL PLAY YOUR IPOD RIGHT NOW YOUNG LADY. She begged me to keep playing. Finally I said, “Sophie, just sit still and be normal.” She literally looked at me quizically and said, “What is normal anyways?”